SBIR-STTR Award

NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Scout (NEAS) mission incorporates the current state of the art in solar sail packaging, fabrication, and testing. In early 2018, NeXolve will complete design, fabrication, ground deployment testing, packaging, and delivery of the 100m2 class NEAS sail to NASA MSFC. The current approach used for NEAS packaging has practical limits with regard to scalability to larger sails and the ability to support much needed reliable and repeatable ground deployment testing at the NEAS scale. The efficiency and reliability of packaging processes also pose technical and schedule risk to the sail program. The current NEAS sail packaging processes are labor intensive, time consuming, have implicit risk to the sail due to extensive handling, and are not considered scalable beyond the NEAS class sail. The proposed innovative packaging processes and mechanisms will address the limits encountered by the current NEAS processes and mechanisms. The proposed innovations improve packaging quality and efficiency by: Maintain high specular surface integrity Reduce risk of entanglement, “blossoming”, creasing, stacking, or “sticksion”. Reduce sail damage (tears) Reduce flight packaging cycle duration Enabling multiple ground tests cycles Provide reliable and scalable options for larger 1000m2 class sails The proposed technology development includes development of mechanical folding aids and mechanisms that will provide reliable and repeatable folding a storage of very thin ethereal sail materials that are very difficult to package using state of the art manual labor intensive process. The project also addresses issues of scalability by developing methods for fabricating sales in-situ with the packaging process. Thus enabling fabrication and packaging of Sails too large to be laid out flat and folded using current state of the art methods. Potential NASA Applications The proposed technology will improve reliability and testability of sails in current CubeSat class (NEA Scout, Nanosail). However, the largest payoff of this technology will be realized by developing a feasible method for packaging and deploying much larger solar sails (1000+ Sq. Meters) for future high value missions such as Geo-Storm, pole sitters, inter-stellar missions and other proposed sail applications. Potential Non-NASA Applications There are many applications where larger continuous films would improve current practices. For example seamless protective covers for aircraft, large structures and agriculture. The technology developed in this activity is generic and can be applied to fabrication of many different types of thin flexible materials such as polymers, fabrics, and foils.

The experience of building the NEA Scout solar Sail resulted in the realization that new manufacturing technology would be required to build solar sails significantly larger than NEA Scout. During Phase I, NeXolve successfully developed and demonstrated fab and fold processes and scalable-modular pathfinder mechanisms that can be fully developed to support fabrication and packaging of larger solar sails, drag sails, power sails, or other deployable thin film structures. To meet the technical objective of developing scalable processes and mechanisms, NeXolve intentionally limited the fabrication footprint and made it smaller than the deployed sail footprint.The processes and mechanisms were developed and verified through fabrication, packaging and deployment testing of a sub-scale pathfinder solar sail. NeXolve conducted extensive design trade studies for the “four-quadrant” sail architecture while collaborating with NASA and industry partners to define and assess proposed and planned large NASA Solar Sail missions that will be enabled by the new manufacturing technology. Potential NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words) In this Phase I activity our efforts were focused on developing technology to build larger solar sails faster with less cost and more reliability. NASA has many applications that will significantly benefit from the improved manufacturing technology developed in this program. Large Arrays are currently used for many applications in space including; Solar Sails, Deorbit Devices, Sunshields, Solar Arrays, Antennas, and many other applications that require light weight, large surface area and efficient folding and packaging. Potential Non-NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words) NeXolve currently provides deployable thin film technologies to commercial companies. These commercial customers have expressed interest in our manufacturing technology to support their activities involving large array projects they are pursing including drag sails for commercial de-orbit systems, large aperture RF applications, and remote sensing.